#Sanyo
Robert,
Believe it or not the Sanyo is not a bad deck. For the price it's probably a
really good deck. Most of the negative comments regarding the deck have stemmed
from outrageous claims about it being a 7750 replacement, and being able to
accept 10s of thousands of frames without any dropouts, jitter, etc. (Although
I believe the last note I saw, admitted that there was a minimum amount of
frame jitter, etc. which means we're at least getting a little more of the
truth.)
For the type of work you're talking about doing, my first guess would be that
the Sanyo will do fine, and more than likely by the time it wears out you'll be
wanting to move up to a higher level tape format anyway.
I actually have a couple of animators that I shell work out to, who are both
using the Sanyo.
As to similarly priced alternatives, the DPS unit is really nice and is alot
faster. We've played with one for a while now, and are going to be utilizing
several of them for preview purposes before we dump to tape. I believe Martin
Foster is really hyped on the DPS unit and can probably give you more input
about it. I also think I saw that Greg Pyros and his group were going to work
on a set of drivers for it. So they should both be able to help you out.
In the end your decision should probably be based on what you're going to use a
deck for. If you're just looking for a preview deck, then either the Sanyo or
one of the DPS units will probably work well. One of the big questions is where
is your client going to see the preview? Or are they going to see it? If you're
going to a service bureau for final output, then your choices are wide open,
all of the solutions will work for you. If you're planning on delivering a tape
directly to the client, then you have to consider which unit is going to
provide you with a cleaner picture when you finally get the thing to VHS. (Most
clients don't have SVHS
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